Film Review

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If one believes that true cinema artistry is measured primarily by recognition and reward, then Leo McCarey more than earned his place in the directorial pantheon with the popular Cary Grant/Irene Dunne divorce comedy The Awful Truth. Yet when accepting his Best Director Oscar for the film, McCarey offered a mild rebuke to the majority opinion: "Thanks, but you gave it to me for the wrong picture." McCarey was speaking of Make Way for Tomorrow, the film he directed prior to The Awful Truth, a picture that failed to find an audience because of its relentlessly upsetting portrayal of Bark Cooper (Victor Moore) and his wife Lucy (Beulah Bondi), an elderly couple facing the frustrating challenges of age. McCarey opens Make Way for Tomorrow in the literal heavens, the sun breaking through the clouds to choral accompaniment. "Honor thy mother and father!" screams one of those grandiose '30s title cards, a sweeping visual assertion—nearly operatic—that posits the film as a Biblical parable. It also threatens an inevitable narrative stumble into cinematic sadomasochism, yet McCarey never trades in dishonest Pavlovian manipulation. Orson Welles reportedly said of the film, "It would make a stone cry," and, indeed, the tears that come are more than earned.

Make Way for Tomorrow's opening visual aria leaves one unprepared for the subtle, insightful observation to follow. Scenes such as a melancholy Christmas get-together—where Bark and Lucy inform their grown children of their financial woes—show McCarey's intimate understanding of family dynamics. The character personalities in this sequence are familiar, bordering on stereotype and cliché, but note that McCarey rarely isolates a single actor in close-up. Instead, through a series of complementary two- and four-shots, children and parents react to the news in slightly different ways, enacting a kind of symphonic musical distress that is instantly recognizable though entirely unique. Leo Tolstoy wrote that "All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," a statement that accounts for the simultaneous familiarity and alien-ness of the Cooper family and their dire situation.

After Bark and Lucy are separated—each living with different children, hundreds of miles apart—McCarey profoundly illustrates the characters' anxieties. Lucy lives in a middle-class city apartment with her son, his wife, and their daughter, and she is almost always a nuisance. In a particularly wrenching scene, the squeak of Lucy's rocking chair interrupts her daughter-in-law's bridge game. The glances thrown at Lucy by the woman and her friends are complicated mixtures of contempt, pity, and fear; they are both hateful and sympathetic to Lucy's situation while terrified at the reflection she provides of their own futures. The tension comes to a head a moment later when Lucy receives a phone call from Bark. McCarey focuses his camera almost entirely on Lucy as she expresses the solemn hope of seeing her husband again. The bridge players are silent, out-of-focus shadows in the background, and yet there's a palpable sense of a pained collective consciousness exhaling its many miseries, a draining emotional release expertly captured on film by McCarey and his actors.

Bark's troubles are no less exhaustive. Often ill, and living in a low-rent country home with his daughter and her husband, Bark's sole pleasure comes from an aged local store owner, both of them commiserating over lost pasts and fleeting presents. McCarey lingers over their conversations, attuning our ears to the unique rhythms and cadences: an impressive feat in the fledgling years of the sound film. In McCarey's view, the elderly are slipping away into a forgotten abyss, so words are a necessary outlet, a way of constantly reestablishing one's identity against both a cruel society and nature's predestined course. Outside an employment office a young man snidely asks of Bark, "You were a bookkeeper?" To which Bark responds, "I am a bookkeeper!" His forceful declaration might as well be a defiant rebuke to Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates, a vigorous pronouncement of mortal war on the heavens themselves.

But the film does not allow for mortal victory. As Make Way for Tomorrow proceeds, a heavy sense of the inevitable descends, culminating in Bark and Lucy's permanent separation to rest homes on opposite coasts. Before they depart, the couple treat themselves to a bittersweet night on the town, and it is here that McCarey's masterful mise en scène recalls the spare profundity of a Japanese landscape print—no surprise that the film is the ostensible inspiration for Yasujirô Ozu's Tokyo Story. Having moved his camera through numerous class settings, McCarey climaxes Make Way for Tomorrow at a ritzy upper-class hotel, a locale perhaps frequented by the thieving devil-may-care protagonists of Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise. But this hotel is as harsh and foreboding as it is beautiful (the weight of the Great Depression crouches at its doors), and it finally seems a hollowed out purgatory where clueless souls wile away the hours of their lives. Bark and Lucy bring a minuscule measure of awareness to this earthbound Chamber of Guf: the hotel owner listens to their stories with friendly bemusement, a bandleader plays a slow waltz to accommodate their "old folks" tempo, giving them a condescendingly complicit nod. Yet nothing outshines the film's own awful truth, for as the clock strikes nine and Bark and Lucy depart (keeping destiny's cruel appointment) the hotel patrons' ignorant dance continues. Age and wisdom exit the stage, leaving youthful oblivion.

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When you are speaking of the most moving movie scenes of all times, certainly you’re going to choose several from MWFT. There’s the heartbreaking final moment when the old man is going away and the old lady is at the train station to see him off. He doesn’t know—but she does, and you do—that they will never see each other again. There’s their warm, wonderful second honeymoon when they go for a ride in a car that’s being hopefully demonstrated—but they think the salesman is just a friendly, obliging man. There is the tentative attempt at a little waltz—but the music turns to swing. There is the absolutely devastating scene when the old lady gets a telephone call from her husband so many miles away—and pours out her love and loneliness to him, oblivious of the annoyed, the ashamed, then strangely touched guests at a card party in the room where she is on the phone. Try to see that without choking up.

I yield to no one in admiration for Victor Moore, but the person who tore you apart at all of those moments was the beloved Beulah Bondi, surely the most versatile character actress on all levels the movies have ever known. She wasn’t one of those darling lavender-and-old-lace ladies. Her Lucy Cooper could be a cranky, cantankerous old girl. But she was so real, she was frightening. Academy Oscars ceased to have their full value the year she did not get a nomination for Make Way for Tomorrow.

With the passage of time this revered film has lost none of its power to rend the heart and captivate. It may well be even more affecting with the passing of those long years. Without hyperbole, it can be said that Bondi's performance is as close to flawless as any can be. It is all the more impressive for having been sustained by for woman in her late forties. "I felt it was quite a challenge, "Bondi stated, "I think that Lucy Cooper is perhaps the oldest character I had ever played. I supposed her to be in her late seventies or early eighties. I thought it was a challenge, but I loved the story." "To be a convincing old woman," Bondi emphasized, "you must be a lover of life and a student of human nature. You must have a passionate desire to know what's going on in the heart and head of the character you are portraying. When you really care more about the character you are portraying than you care about yourself or how you look, you are no longer just a person who earns a living by acting." Nevertheless, regarding this rare lead Bondi declared, "Give me a good supporting role and that's all I ask. I never want to be the star again. The life of a star, with few exceptions, is brief. It's like a merry-go-round, only suddenly the music stops playing."

She had been nominated in 1936 for her Rachel Jackson, the pitiful, pipe-smoking Wife of President Andy in The Gorgeous Hussy, a Joan Crawford-Lionel Barrymore film that had little else to recommend it. And she was perfection in so many other roles—as Mrs. Jones, the archetype of all tenement slatterns in Street Scene, her film debut (she had created the role on the stage)... Melissa Tolliver, gentle mountain mother, crying out against the blood lust of her clan in The Trail of the Lonesome Pine ...as the half-crazed crone trying to regain her youth in Maid of Salem...the sacrificing wife of stern preacher Walter Huston, and mother of thoughtless soldier James Stewart in the Civil War drama Of Human Hearts, (which earned her a second Oscar nomination) ...and in so many other roles of infinite variety that continued through the 1940’s, the 1950’s, and into the 1960’s. In the twenties, she had created roles in the theatre. In the 1940’s and 1950’s she would be sweet again, and evil again and elegant or drab. But, in the 1930’s, she was all of those women—the loving mothers, the harridans, the aristocrats, the frontier women, the religious psalm singers. And she was the pince-nezed, righteous wife of ev. Davidson in Rain...the greed-driven Mrs. Haggerty in The Late Christopher Bean...the prototype of mother to come home to at Christmas in Remember the Night...the beautiful old lady who goes so willingly with Death in On Borrowed Time and the once-inhibited, once-repressed wife of a college dean in Vivacious Lady.

But, above all, she was Lucy Cooper of Make Way for Tomorrow. That alone—if she had done none of her others—would make her a screen immortal.